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Challenging a Rival, Viewer by Viewer

Hours after Oprah Winfrey publicly chastised the author James Frey, Anderson Cooper opened his prime-time program on CNN by interviewing someone who had spoken to Mr. Frey just after he departed Ms. Winfrey's set.

It was Larry King, whose program precedes Mr. Cooper's and who had taken an on-air call from Ms. Winfrey defending Mr. Frey two weeks earlier.

Watching from bed that night, and taking notes on a laptop, was Jonathan Klein, the president of CNN's domestic operations, who saw the volleying between Mr. King and Mr. Cooper as a moment warranting some celebration. There was Mr. Cooper giving Mr. King something akin to a victory lap for making "Larry King Live," and by extension CNN, an essential component of the week's most fevered water-cooler conversation, a goal of Mr. Klein's since he assumed his post nearly 14 months earlier.

But Mr. Klein also took some pride that Mr. King -- by far the highest-rated host in its prime-time lineup -- was being given an opportunity to electronically escort his audience to Mr. Cooper's program. Among Mr. Klein's charges to Mr. Cooper, whom he installed in the 10 p.m. Eastern time slot after jettisoning Aaron Brown last November, has been to hold more of Mr. King's audience than his predecessor had -- something that, thus far, Mr. Cooper has been doing. Mr. Cooper has been retaining 90 percent of Mr. King's viewers in the age group that cable news advertisers value most, in contrast to the 70 percent Mr. Brown held.

More than a year after Mr. Klein took responsibility for CNN's main network, which is owned by Time Warner, he has taken to savoring small victories like these as he continues to try to chip away at the juggernaut represented by Fox News, a division of the News Corporation.

The ratings contest between the two cable news channels remains hugely lopsided -- the 2.05 million viewers that Fox drew, on average, during prime time last year is more than double the 936,000 who watched CNN, according to Nielsen Media Research. To Mr. Klein, those numbers have obscured some of the progress that his network has made on his watch.

And yet, as he embarks on his second year in his job, Mr. Klein continues to struggle with how to define and distinguish CNN in the face of such overwhelming competition.

Last month, for example, he seemed to retreat on one of the earliest campaign promises that he had executed -- eliminating the political shoutfests "Crossfire" and "The Capital Gang" -- when he hired, as commentators, two conservatives, William J. Bennett and J. C. Watts. Both might well appeal to Fox News viewers, and appeared to have been cast as foils to the Democratic strategists James Carville, Paul Begala and Donna Brazile, who are also on CNN.

Asked in an interview last week if the network was lurching toward a "Crossfire" redux as the midterm Congressional elections approached, Mr. Klein said that it was not, and that the two new commentators would serve as analysts, including for Wolf Blitzer on his program "The Situation Room."

"This is not at all like 'Crossfire,' which was purposely setting left-wingers against right-wingers," Mr. Klein said. "We are simply looking for provocative ideas, as opposed to shouting matches."

When asked if he might be tempted to pit Mr. Bennett and Mr. Carville against each other on Mr. Blitzer's program, Mr. Klein said, "You never say never," adding "but that's not the premise."

Among the reasons some CNN staff members had puzzled over the hiring of Mr. Bennett were his incendiary comments, on his radio show last fall, that "you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down." Mr. Bennett had also characterized such a proposal as "impossible, ridiculous and morally reprehensible." Mr. Klein said last week that Mr. Bennett, in responding to the controversy, "had explained himself very clearly and well," and was "a guy who has some very evolved thoughts and is not afraid to express them."

Mr. Klein also sought, in that same interview, to reiterate a point that he has made since the outset of his tenure -- that he does not consider Fox News, with its opinion-oriented prime-time schedule, to be his network's main competition. Instead, he said that he operated in a bigger universe that also included Discovery, A&E and even the Weather Channel.

"It's a fool's errand to limit our thinking to one or two other news networks," he said. "We also compete with 'Dancing with the Stars' and 'Skating with Celebrities.' I'll be in a hotel room watching Larry King and my wife calls and says that I have to check out 'American Idol.' "

And yet, Mr. Klein continually volunteered comparisons between the ratings performance of CNN programs and Fox's.

He noted, for example, that Paula Zahn's one-hour news program that is shown at 8 p.m. Eastern time was up by double digits last year in the 25-to-54-year-old demographic. (CNN increased by 18.5 percent in the time slot over 2004, according to Nielsen.) Her competitor on Fox News, Bill O'Reilly, was down in the same category at the same time (a loss of 20 percent).

"I'd rather be in our situation than the other guys' " Mr. Klein said. "We're on the right side of all those trend lines."

Never mind that Fox News had an average of 2.5 million viewers at 8 p.m. in 2004, to CNN's 774,000.

Over all, between 8 p.m. and 11 p.m. Eastern time on weeknights last year, Fox's average audience grew by 49,000 viewers, or 2.5 percent, while CNN's fell by 37,000, or 3.8 percent. Yet again, though, Mr. Klein discerned a silver lining: Fox's prime-time growth, he said, continued to be built on a foundation of aging viewers (over 54), who are less attractive to advertisers. Fox News' average viewership among those 25 to 54 years old actually fell by 118,000, according to Nielsen, while CNN was up 9,000 in that category.

Sam Armando, vice president and director of national television research for Starcom Worldwide, a media planning and buying firm, said that, he, too, had detected similar trends at both CNN and Fox News in recent months.

"This initial bump at CNN has said to me, I need to open my eyes and keep an eye on them," he said. "It's a little premature, but the signs are there."

Mr. Klein is at his most exuberant when discussing the journalism on CNN over the last year. He was once the second-ranking executive at CBS News, and he has reinforced CNN's ranks by adding two veteran producers with broadcast experience. They are David Doss, formerly of "NBC Nightly News" and "Primetime" on ABC, who is now Mr. Cooper's producer, and Victor Neufeld, formerly of ABC's "20/20" and the "Early Show" on CBS, who is Ms. Zahn's. Beginning next week, they will be complemented on camera by John Roberts, formerly the chief White House correspondent of CBS News.

Mr. Klein noted that, on his watch, the network's reporters and producers, and especially Mr. Cooper, had blanketed crises like Hurricane Katrina, the West Virginia coal mine disaster and the tsunami in Asia. But CNN has always seemed to excel at covering crises.

Mr. Klein said that he had also exhorted his charges, on breaking stories as well as those that might not rise to the level of disaster, to "get there early and stay longer." As an example, he pointed to an enterprise report on Mr. Cooper's program last Monday that showed officials of St. Bernard Parish in New Orleans allowing several residents to appropriate trailers that were sitting unoccupied because the federal government had not yet fulfilled a promise to pay to lease them on the residents' behalf. A description of a similar scene later appeared in an article on the front page of The New York Times.

Sometimes, though, Mr. Klein and his colleagues have gone after stories at a far more fevered pitch and pace than other outlets. When officials discovered a 2,400-foot tunnel last month under the border between Tijuana and San Diego, CNN "poured resources all over it," Mr. Klein said, beginning with a report from the scene by Mr. Cooper on Monday, Jan. 30, and a one-hour special at 11 p.m. Eastern time the following Friday.

"To their credit, our shows just went," Mr. Klein said. "They didn't need to see it on the wires all over the place. They didn't need to see it on the front page of The New York Times."

"The journalism led to great ratings," he added, though the special won a time period that typically attracts many fewer viewers.

For all the attention he pays to his network's ratings vis-à-vis those of Fox News, Mr. Klein might also have mentioned that MSNBC, which typically has less than half the audience of CNN in prime time, has lately been gaining on CNN in the 25-to-54-year-old demographic and has drawn some attention -- including for "Countdown" with Keith Olbermann at 8 p.m. Eastern time and for experimenting with a prime-time Friday night lineup stocked with true-crime documentaries.

Mr. Klein said he was not necessarily impressed or concerned.

"Any of us can do the quick fix. We can all go to true crime," he said. "But it's a deal with the devil. You confuse your identity to the audience."

"Next thing you know," he said, summoning a name from the annals of crime shows past, "you'll see Robert Stack anchoring."